Sounds like something I'd likely fail. Without putting pen to paper, I can get from taking the two words and expanding Lev distances until we find a word in common, and then mapping a a route from A to that word, then from that word to B, but whatever I wrote would probably be horribly inefficient, at best.

I would also wager that whomever was asking that sort of question would probably be looking for some optimal form of the answer, and having never encountered it, oh well.